Posts Tagged "dogs"

Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. Let’s get [...]

With a winning combination of cuteness, digging-osity, and the precision focus of a heat-seaking missile, Este the truffle dog has helped blaze a trail together with scientists that could both enliven American diets and help support American pecan growers. Have a look: Este appears to be a Lagotto Romagnolo, an Italian hunting dog originally bred [...]

We’ve all met dogs with a small head and large body who bear a striking resemblance to the people with shrunken heads from the movie Beetlejuice. Some dogs naturally come with this particular head-to-body ratio, but for others, it’s often man-made. Yes. Some dogs are overweight. Peter Sandøe, professor of bioethics at the University of [...]

Well, not quite. But maybe they wrecked a few Dog Fart Suits. But did cow farts blow up a building in Germany? Or is that just an April Fools joke? Read here to find out. ~~~ Image: ‘I’m gassy and I know it‘ used with permission: Tyler Gildin and Elite Daily. References Motupalli P (2013) [...]

Apparently cows are terrorists too. Last month, journalists reported—in what can only be described as a “chicken-run” scenario of cows plotting their big escape—that a herd of dairy cows in central Germany caused an explosion in their housing facility. Police failed to thwart the plan, as the explosion seemed to be caused by flatulence. Yes, [...]

I meant to tell you this earlier. The Dog Spies tag line: ‘Explore the science behind the dog in your bed’ is actually short for ‘Explore the science behind the dog in your bed — and all the other animals we interact with and care for.’ You can see why brevity won, but this expanded [...]

Sitting on the couch, with your dog curled up by your side looking ever-so-peaceful, maybe you’ve been overcome by the thought, “Gosh, wouldn’t Banjo make the most perfect therapy dog!?” Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to being a therapy dog than many realize, reminds certified applied animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell in a recent article for [...]

I recently saw a clip of Neil Patrick Harris hosting the 2013 Emmys. He was doing a bit about Google Glass and said he was watching an episode of American Horror Story on his contacts while hosting the show. And then, mid-sentence, he freaked out (1min 44sec)! Understandable; there’s a lot to freak out about [...]

Boulder, CO better count its chickens and get its ducks in a row because the Animal Behavior Society is on its way! That’s right. This weekend, I’m off to the 50th Annual Conference of the Animal Behavior Society in Boulder, CO (Twitter/Facebook). This 5-day conference features inquiry into animal behavior in the broadest sense and [...]

Until recently, the only association I made between dogs and pantyhose would have involved an unfortunate trip to the vet. Of the inanimate objects pulled from pets’ gastrointestinal tracts — from drywall and hearing aids to corn cobs and toy cars — pantyhose, and their cousins, socks and underwear, top the list. But last week, [...]

I was probably 12 years old (fine, 13) the last time I played with Barbies. School was closed for a snow day, and one of my best friends trudged over to my house for mac and cheese and Barbies. But after choosing our dolls and clothing, we stopped. We couldn’t remember what came next. All [...]

Primates don’t get much more spectacular than the furry, short-tailed, long-faced, pink-rumped monkeys known as drills (Mandrillus leucophaeus). But despite their striking looks, drills—which are closely related to baboons and the even more wildly colored, blue-faced mandrills (M. sphinx)—have not fared well in the wild over the past few decades. Drills have become one of [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

Where did the Australian dingo go? Once present throughout that country, the feared predator (Canis lupus dingo) in its current form is on its way to extinction as it is either killed or breeds and hybridizes with domesticated dogs. With the disappearance of the purebred dingo comes the loss of an important part of the [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

Dogs play a crucial role in human cancer research. More young scientists and physicians should know this, says Floryne O. Buishand, a Young Scientist at the 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. With her DVM, Buishand is a small animal surgery resident at the faculty of veterinary medicine at Utrecht University in The Netherlands and also [...]

Kathleen Raven is a writer living in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her MS in Ecology with a focus on sustainable agriculture and MA in Health & Medical Journalism from the University of Georgia. Kathleen can be found on Twitter as @sci2mrow.

Millions of people around the world come home to four legs and a wagging tail, and many spend some of their time together playing. While dog-dog play has been studied extensively, dog-person play, which takes on a different form and appears to have different rules, has not attracted nearly as much scholarly attention. At the [...]

Doing surgery in a tent on a tropical island is harder work than you’d think. It gets so hot that the sweat trickles from your surgical cap into your eyes, and when it rains on the tarp roof you can’t hear what your anesthetist is saying. I know this because I’ve worked on spay and [...]

As we sat in my car outside a silent movie theater in Los Angeles, my friend anxiously opened a plastic bag containing a white T-shirt she’d slept in for the past three nights. “Does it smell like me?” she asked nervously, gesturing the open end toward my face. I stuck my nose into the bag [...]

In shows like Lassie, I was always impressed at the amount of information a dog was able to convey to a human: ‘What’s that, Lassie? A little girl trapped in a building that you tried to reach but then couldn’t owing to the fire that caught alight to the fence surrounding it?’ I never owned [...]

Have you ever wondered what makes you right- or left-handed? Well, in humans and other mammals, the brain is divided down the middle, or ‘lateralized’. One of the effects of this is that people can be right-handed or left-handed (having better motor skill with one hand or the other). This is because one half of [...]

Josh is a senior editor at Scientific American, covering biology, chemistry, and earth science. On Twitter, he is @jfischman, and you can email him story ideas at jfischman@sciam.com Josh can be found on Twitter as @jfischman.

On the streets of Beijing, little old ladies coax even littler dogs to do their business. Some even bear the little plastic bags carried by civically conscious urbanite pet-lovers everywhere. Yet in cities across China one can also still find dog on the menu, as I can personally attest. This divide between a growing middle [...]

NEW YORK—When it comes to brain power, we humans like to think we’re the animal kingdom’s undisputed champions. But in the past few decades we’ve had to make a lot of room on our mantle place for shared trophies. Problem-solving? Sorry, but crows and octopuses do that too. Tool use? Primates, birds and even fish [...]

Late last year, I wrote about one of the only photographs ever taken in the wild of arguably the rarest dog in the world – the New Guinea Singing Dog. The first was taken by Australian mammalogist and palaeontologist, Tim Flannery, in 1989, and the second was taken by Tom Hewitt, Director of Adventure Alternative Borneo, in August 2012. Almost [...]

Bec Crew is a Sydney-based science writer and award-winning blogger. She is the author of 'Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals' (NewSouth Press). Bec can be found on Twitter as @BecCrew.

They may have the largest physical variety among all animal species on Earth, but dogs can still recognise one of their own over any other animal based on simple images of their faces. Since their domestication somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 years ago, dogs have been learning to use facial cues as an important part [...]

Bec Crew is a Sydney-based science writer and award-winning blogger. She is the author of 'Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals' (NewSouth Press). Bec can be found on Twitter as @BecCrew.

Last year the Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia volume titled Extinct Life appeared in print. I was asked to cover South American mammals, perhaps because they wanted me to write about borhyaenoids, toxodonts, litopterns, astrapotheres and so on (some of which have been covered on Tet Zoo in the past – I really need to get back [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.